Thursday, 30 January 2014

ANALLY RAPED A DYING WOMAN
OR: WHAT HAPPENS WHEN PEOPLE FROM A FAILED CULTURE MASS-MIGRATE TO A VERY CIVILISED CULTURE (WITH ALREADY FOR YEARS TOP SCORES IN THE HUMAN DEVELOPMENT REPORTS)
>>> In Sweden Somali immigrant Abdi Hakim Ali is a prime example of what happens when it does go off. He first raped and sodomized a drunk woman as she slept. Weeks later he anally raped a dying woman who overdosed on drugs. Even after she perished in the midst of his attack. The vermin carried on raping her corpse.

I shared this post on the Facebook page of my party Liberty GB, with a variation:

ANALLY RAPED A DYING WOMAN
OR: WHAT HAPPENS WHEN PEOPLE FROM A FAILED CULTURE MASS-MIGRATE TO A CIVILISED (BUT WITH A SERIOUS DRINKING AND DRUGS PROBLEM) SOCIETY

We have to realise one thing here: Western societies are always, rightly, contrasted with Islamic ones in terms of civilisation and progress. But we should stop idealising ourselves. If our own societies were not in serious trouble after decades of Leftist ideological rule, we wouldn't have any problems of Islamisation in the first place, because Muslims would not have been allowed to immigrate here in huge numbers and impose their ways on us rather than accepting to change in order to integrate.

They cannot change without stopping being Muslim, of course. And there lies the problem. Why don't our ruling elites realise the obvious reality of what Islam is - after all, you just have to read the Quran and other Islamic scriptures, along with their many commentaries by experts like Robert Spencer and several others, whose criticisms of Islam very closely correspond to what we see with our own eyes and hear with our own ears, rather than clamorously clashing with them as those of Islam apologists do?

The answer to this question is in the paragraph I wrote just above the one containing the question: "decades of Leftist ideological rule".

The Left, putting into practice - in some cases knowingly, in others not - Cultural Marxism with its theory of cultural hegemony developed by Italian Communist Party's co-founder Antonio Gramsci, has managed to make a socialist revolution without blood spilling - until now at least.

It has used culture, rather than the storming of palaces, to impose its ideas on a vast mass of people who for 50-60 years have been watching the TV channels it controls, reading the papers it dominates, seeing the films that the liberal Hollywood produces, learning in schools and universities totally imbued with its ideology.

The results can be seen in the story reported at the top of this article:

He [a Somali Muslim] first raped and sodomized a drunk woman as she slept. Weeks later he anally raped a dying woman who overdosed on drugs.

Here we have the double effect of the Left's dominion on Western societies.

On one hand, great numbers of uncontrolled, unrestricted, often illegal immigrants from the most socially backward parts of the world - which are usually Muslim - are allowed into our countries bringing with them their unchecked and unrefined mores, without even an attempt on our part to make them adapt, since we must "celebrate diversity". After all, the Left thinks that we owe them, due to our - according to the Marxist revision of history - terribly imperialist past, and anyway simply because they are poor and we are - relatively - rich.

On the other, the idea that there is something more important in life than self-gratification, the ethical thinking that derives from the West's historical Christian roots, has been gradually abandoned, along with Christianity itself. "Religion is the opium of the people" was one of the greatest of Karl Marx's dogmas. Another was: morality is bourgeois, is another form of the capitalist class's oppression of the proletariat.

Make no mistakes. The terms and expressions used today may be different - after all, fashions change, language evolves -, but the ideas are exactly the same. Marx and Engels wanted the destruction of the family and thought that children should be reared communally. They both hated the family just as much as private property.

The family is patriarchal, is a capitalist institution, they believed. Much like the feminists of our modern times, who are in many ways heirs (or heiresses) to Marxism.

The Left is ideologically and historically anti-Christian, rejects the idea that sexual life is within the ethical sphere - "it's only love" -, and is lax in its morality and self-discipline.

The epidemics of alcohol and drugs abuse, obesity, shopaholism and indebtedness, welfare dependency, fatherlessness, sexually-transmitted diseases, and many more malaises of our societies derive from the same cause: the erosion of Christian values and the triumph of Leftist doctrines.

While more and more people seem to realise the former disastrous effect of the Left's control over Western countries - multiculturalism -, unfortunately not nearly as many understand the latter, no less tragic, effect - abandonment of Christianity with its non-self-centred worldview.

When I shared the post about the Somali rapist on Liberty GB's Facebook page, it got many comments, all invariably remarking on the "Muslim immigrant rapes Swedish women" aspect of the story, but not even one observing the fact that a woman was so drunken that she didn't even notice - she is described as asleep -, and the other was dying of a drugs overdose. And this despite my purposeful editing of the post with the addition of "a civilised (but with a serious drinking and drugs problem) society" in reference to Sweden, aimed at alerting to these very serious phenomena.

One of the ways, although by no means the only one, in which the neo-Marxist indoctrination of the masses has taken place is through such a distorted caricature of Christianity and its history that it makes them unrecognisable, and it would be funny were it not tragic.

Wednesday, 29 January 2014

If you look around you, you see more and more people forbidden to enter a country, put in jail or out of business just for expressing their opinion. I agree that nobody should publicly insult individuals or groups with no good reason, but there's a fine line between exposing a wrong-doing and offending the wrong-doer.

In Britain, the new counterjihad party Liberty GB's Radio Officer Tim Burton is on trial for calling Fiyaz Mujhal on Twitter “a lying Muslim scumbag”. Mr Mujhal, founder and director of Tell MAMA (Measuring Anti-Muslim Attacks), had been revealed to report misleading facts and figures about presumed "Islamophobic" incidents and his organisation's public funding had been discontinued because of it.

Now I read that in the country of the maple leaf the Free Dominion website, which is the Canadian equivalent of the USA's Free Republic, for which I write, has 5 days ago been put practically out of business by a court order.

As eventually emerged at a Canadian "Human Rights" Tribunal hearing, he adopts Internet disguises and posts as a "hatemonger" on so-called "hate sites", and then sues those sites. Very foolishly, the Canadian courts have rewarded him for playing dress-up Nazi.

This means we are barred for life from ever operating a public forum or a blog (even about cookie recipes) where the public can comment. If we do so, any one of Warman’s handful of supporters could, and probably would, use a common proxy server to avoid being traced, plant a negative comment about Warman on our site, and we would both be charged with contempt of court.

Steyn also says:

Mr. Warman joined Stormfront and other “white supremacist” websites and posted copious amounts of hate speech of his own, describing, for example, Jewish members of cabinet as “scum” and gays as a “cancer.” That’s how “hateful” Canada is: there’s so little “hate” out there that the country’s most famous Internet Nazi is a taxpayer-funded civil servant.

Apparently – believe it or not – there is not enough 'online hate crime' to go round and some more 'online hate crime' had to be urgently manufactured to justify the hundreds of thousands of pounds of taxpayers' money needed to sustain the organisation.

Another example of political use of what should be the justice system is for the purpose of persecuting (as well as prosecuting) political adversaries. One of the most reported cases of unfairly applying the law to attack political foes was that of the IRS (the American tax authorities) that a year ago admitted to singling out the Tea Party and other like-minded groups.

In the US, government departments and agencies use

their powers selectively to chastise their political enemies. In a hyper-regulatory state, there are laws against everything, and everyone is guilty of being in breach of at least 300 of them at any hour of the day. I have no use for Dinesh D'Souza, for example, but it seems obvious that he's been set up as this season's Benghazi video maker. There are gazillions of $20,000 campaign-finance infractions across America, but the only guy that's been singled out is the fellow who made a hit anti-Obama movie. As John Hayward puts it, he's been

...busted for doing 59 in a 55-mph campaign-finance zone in your little compact car, while huge semi trucks full of political cash blast past you at a hundred miles an hour without the cops batting an eye.

D'Souza's enemies are gloating. As is the habit in the American system, he will most likely be prevailed upon to cop a plea in return for a reduced sentence. And everyone else will get the message: If you make a film or write a book attacking Obama, make sure it's a flop - or anyway not so big a hit it catches the regime's eye.

D'Souza is accused of contributing $20,000, which is more than the legal limit, to the Senate candidacy of his friend Wendy Long. The idea that the Obama administration has a zero tolerance policy towards campaign finance violations is absurd in the extreme. During Obama’s both 2008 and 2012 campaigns the Obama website, as John Hinderaker writes, was

deliberately designed (by disabling standard security protocols that are used by all other campaigns) to encourage illegal contributions by foreigners and donors who, like D’Souza, had already contributed the maximum allowable. No federal authority has made the slightest effort to investigate, let alone criminally prosecute, those obvious violations by the Obama campaign and an unknown number of its contributors.

And, on the subject of zero tolerance of electoral violations, how about enforcing the laws against voter fraud? Voter fraud has become an element of the Democrats’ election strategy, to the point where they react with hysteria whenever anyone tries to take steps to prevent illegal votes from being cast. If the U.S. Attorney is so concerned about honest elections, what has he, or any other law enforcement authority in New York State, done to enforce the laws relating to ballot integrity?

D'Souza's real crime is his achievement: the anti-Obama film 2016 he made is the second biggest-grossing political documentary of all time.

Wednesday, 22 January 2014

Femen is a group of disgusting feminists whose main purpose seems to be aggression and ferocious attacks against Christianity and its symbols. They can't be offended for being called "disgusting" because disgust is what they constantly try to provoke in normal people.

I wonder how these men-haters would fare in non-Christian societies, like Muslim ones, for example.

Freedom of expression is for everything, of course: repugnant and meaningless displays of vulgarity as well as reasoned discourse, unworthy as well as valuable communications.

But at least we should recognise that some people use it in a mindless way, just to offend without a real objective.

And anyway, exhibitions of Femen's rotten anti-aesthetical sense in churches do violate the law, since they trespass on private property, as was the case of those "sex workers", as the politically-correct expression goes, of Pussy Riotin Russia.

the particularly odious profanation by a young woman member of the group Femen in the church of the Madeleine in Paris, on the morning of Friday, December 20, has rightly provoked the outrage of Christians and general disapproval of politicians Left and Right.

This new desecration, occurring after those in the Notre-Dame de Paris by the same group Femen, should be treated with the utmost rigour.

Therefore we demand from your government

1. immediate dissolution of the group Femen,

2. immediate revocation of the status of "refugee" that was granted on 9 April by OFPRA to Miss Inna Shevchenko, leader of said group Femen,

3. subsequent expulsion from our country of Miss Inna Shevchenko.

A photo of the Ukrainian Inna Shevchenko can be seen in the English newspaper The Independent, accompanying an article entitled "I don't want to be liked". That she's not after likeability is just lucky, given the aesthetic appeal of the picture in question, in which she is wearing only trousers, while her topless and misshapen torso shows the red writing "Christmas is canceled" and a policeman chases her outside Saint Peter's in the Vatican.

...have desecrated churches... The extremists spread feces on the walls of a Russian Orthodox Church, ordering the priest to remove all Christian symbols. ”And if we didn’t do it, they’d resort to force,” the frightened priest says.

The subject of the first sentence, which I have removed, is "Roving bands of jihadists and Salafists" in Tunisia at the time of the "Arab Spring". But it might very well have been feminist or homosexual activists.

The similarity goes even further: members of Femen call their campaigns “topless Jihad”.

Since the mainstream media will only tell you the small part of the truth that doesn't ruin Femen's image, let's turn to the website A Voice for Men for some facts, all duly documented and sourced:

[W]e have been seeing, here, in Europe, some gruesome acts of vandalism throughout the year 2012 from feminist organizations such as FEMEN and Pussy Riot.

So let’s talk a bit about these FEMEN criminals who, due to the pussy pass, have avoided the jail terms that would have undoubtedly be [sic] applied had it been men who were committing the same deeds they did...

Of course, the fact that they attempted to initiate violence with police [at the 2012 London Olympics] did not actually appear in any English language newspaper, thus the ‘poor little innocent women being victimized by police brutality’ could once again be used. If the protesters were to be naked men around an Olympics venue where there are children, nobody would have questioned the actions of the police forces and placing them on a sex offenders list would have been a foregone conclusion.

But all the aforementioned protests still seem rather innocent to a certain degree.

However, in July 2012, Yana Zhdanova, a FEMEN member, came to the airport when Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, was arriving in Ukraine and ran towards him screaming ‘Get out!’ whilst her naked back contained the following message: “Kill Kirill!"

Yes, it was in English and yes she actually assaulted the Russian Orthodox cleric...

In August, Inna Șevcenko took down, with chainsaw, a wooden cross in the center of Kiev that had been erected in the memory of the people that died during the Stalinist oppression. This took place in front of the former NKVD headquarters.

That’s right, [a] monument erected from private money donated by the survivors of a real oppression, was taken down by an almost-naked feminist, because she felt that the vandals from Pussy Riot had to be set free and thus she is entitled to walk freely with a chainsaw in the center of a European capital city and take down monuments.

700 people were killed in November 1941 in Kiev by Stalin’s regime. That’s only one month out of a long-time regime and only one city. All those people were killed for disliking the predecessor of feminist ideology – Marxism-Leninism. But those people cannot be commemorated properly because the FEMEN movement says so.

Just imagine someone taking down the Washington monument or the monument that’s been placed at ground zero after 9/11. That was the sentimental value of that monument for the Ukrainian people that suffered through real oppression.

The Ukrainian authorities wanted to arrest her but the FEMEN movement organized a blockade and Inna eventually fled Ukraine and moved to France where she opened a ‘training center for activists’ and she actually has the nerve to claim that she is being persecuted by the Ukrainian authorities.

And these violent thugs are being cried over on in the Ukrainian media because they got alienated by their families once they joined the movement. Would anyone from the media even care, let alone be compassionate, if they were men? Again, I sincerely doubt it.

Some might think that calling them ‘violent thugs’ is too much, albeit in my moral compass, someone who uses a chainsaw in the centre of a major city to take down a monument is indeed a violent thug. Allow me translate a statement of Inna Șevcenko in the last article cited above:

I try to shake women in Ukraine and make them socially active. We provoke them, show that women can do it. I generally aim to organize in 2017 a female revolution. Maybe not a matriarchy, but very close to it. Enough with the male sins! [Emphasis added]

The issue of taqiyya – the religious permission, indeed virtue, of Muslim deception to infidels for the good of Islam – is such a uniquely crucial aspect of the relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims, especially, like in the West, when the former are a minority and the latter a majority, that there have been at least a couple of trials in Europe revolving around it, one recent and the other current.

In May 2013 there was a legal case in Italy in which a former member of the Muslim Brotherhood, Khalid Chaouki, a Moroccan Muslim immigrant to Italy and now MP, sued another Moroccan immigrant, Souad Sbai, a woman journalist and former Italian MP who had accused him of practicing taqiyya when he was saying that he had renounced the Brotherhood while in fact he still ’shared its goals and ideas of dangerous, extreme Islam’. He lost the case.

In Britain, in the last few days of 2013 Tim Burton, the Radio Officer of the newly-formed Liberty GB, an outspoken counterjihad, pro-Western and Christian civilisation party, got into trouble.

I have to declare an interest in the matter since I am the party’s Press Officer. Liberty GB has some similarities to Holland’s Freedom Party of Geert Wilders, although in no way, having started as recently as March 2013, it’s as yet so popular. We are running in the coming elections for the European Parliament in May.

Tim Burton has been charged by the Police with racially aggravated harassment for a few tweets and is soon due to appear in court.

At this point I must introduce the individual he tweeted about, a prominent albeit colourful Muslim whom Tim called ‘a mendacious grievance-mongering taqiyya-artist’ on Twitter. He is Fiyaz Mujhal, founder and director of Tell MAMA (Measuring Anti-Muslim Attacks), an organisation that acts like a sort of helpline for the victims of ‘Islamophobia’ and in so doing monitors the entity of what it must consider a grave social problem.

If you are looking for a balanced assessment of the impact of Muslim crime, violence, stealth jihad and terrorism on British society you will not find it on Tell MAMA’s literature or website. But you’ll see plenty of examples of ‘hate’ towards Muslims, a great number of which in the form of films, books, political campaigns and, of course, ‘cyber harassment’, ‘cyber bullying’, ‘cyber abuse’, ‘cyber incitement’, ‘cyber threats’, ‘cyber stalking’, or ‘cyber hate’ – which is what got Tim in a legal jam.

Tell MAMA and the other organisation founded by Mr Mujhal, Faith Matters, had been successful in their demand that the UK Home Office ban Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer from entering the country.

The group has a Working Definition of Anti-Muslim Prejudice that includes ‘insults or attacks against Islam’, of which it’s safe to assume well-documented criticisms will be seen as examples. It is also good at crafting new expressions like ‘Anti-Muslim Cultural Racism’, which is Liberty GB’s sin in Tell MAMA’s eyes, as it describes us as ‘guilty of racialising Muslims’. How somebody can achieve such a feat is anyones’s guess.

In its ardour to chastise Liberty GB, Tell MAMA says something which goes beyond matters of opinion and is factually wrong: ’Halal slaughter and meat would also be banned (but no mention of kosher)’. We do object to kosher too and we say it clearly.

What prompted Tim Burton to label Mr Mujhal on Twitter “a mendacious grievance-mongering taqqiyya-artist” and “a lying Muslim scumbag” were some revelations appeared in The Daily Telegraph. In the wake of the beheading of British soldier Lee Rigby in a London street by two jihadists crying “Allahu Akbar” and giving the Quran as their motive in May of last year, Mr Mujhal in June reported

“a wave of attacks, harassment, and hate-filled speech against Muslims … an unprecedented number of incidents”, including “a rise in street harassment of Muslims – unprovoked, opportunistic attacks from strangers as Muslims go about their lives”.

He added: “Over the past week or so, these sorts of hate crimes have noticeably increased in number and, in many instances, become more extreme.

“The scale of the backlash is astounding … there has been a massive spike in anti-Muslim prejudice. A sense of endemic fear has gripped Muslim communities.”

The media, especially the BBC, have accepted the claims without question. A presenter on Radio 4’s influential Today programme stated that attacks on Muslims were now “on a very serious scale”.

Talk of a “massive anti-Muslim backlash” has become routine. And it is that figure issued by Tell Mama – of, to date, 212 “anti-Muslim incidents” since the Woolwich murder – which has formed the basis of nearly all this reporting.

But when journalist Andrew Gilligan investigated a bit further, it turned out that 57 per cent of the 212 reports referred to activity occurring just online, like postings on Twitter and Facebook, a further 16 per cent of the 212 reports had not been verified and not all the online abuse even originated in Britain.

Contrary to Tell MAMA’s claims of a climate of violence, only 17 of the 212 incidents, 8 per cent, involved the physical targeting of people and there were no attacks on anyone serious enough to require medical treatment.

The organisation has received a total of £375,000 from the UK government. But as a consequence of these revelations and even previous discoveries of discrepancies between its figures and police official figures – showing Tell MAMA’s inflated rates of and increase in anti-Muslim crimes – it had its public funding discontinued.

Mujhal asserted that tougher sentences were needed to tackle Islamophobic crime, noting that the guidelines by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) to monitor social media were “not fit for purpose”.

“They raised the bar of prosecution significantly.

“Now unless there is a direct threat to somebody on Twitter or Facebook, the CPS will not prosecute. The CPS is just plainly out of sync with reality.

“We also need more robust sentencing. In one case, a pig’s head was left outside a mosque and the perpetrator came away with a community sentence.

Perhaps the lawsuit against Tim Burton is part of this campaign which seems apparently to target in particular social media.

Liberty GB is trying to make taqiyya the keystone of this trial. Given the special position of taqiyya in the relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims, especially in non-Muslim-majority countries, if we, by making this case public, manage to make the British and Western people understand the meaning and nature of taqiyya, we will have managed to make them understand the whole nature of Islam in relation to us through it.

The Western public has been misled about Islam and believes that the ‘religion of peace’ is fundamentally similar to Christianity in its ethical outlook. Replace God with Allah, Jesus with Muhammad, and you still have the same moral commandments: love your enemies, be benevolent towards non-Muslims, and thou shall not lie or give false testimony. If the authority of a court can establish that taqiyya was indeed practised, Westerners can start to see that lying to them is not only allowed but encouraged by Islam as one of the means of submitting them to it, which is the final goal. As a consequence of this, people in the West may gradually become more and more reluctant to accept everything that Muslims say about Islam and may begin to doubt all the distortions they are currently fed.

Tuesday, 21 January 2014

No politician or mainstream media outlet is saying why shale gas from fracking may not reduce, as it should, consumers' utility bills.

The reason why energy bills in Britain are so high and will continue to soar is largely the ever-increasing cost of that “green energy” imposed to us by the Climate Change Act of 2008, pushed through Parliament by Ed Miliband, then Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, who recently proposed to halt price hikes made inevitable by his own policies.

Week after week we saw on the panel of Question Time, on BBC1, one or another Labour politician accusing the UK's "big six" (or seven) energy companies of increasing their bills and blaming the coalition government for letting them get away with it.

Tony Blair's Labour government introduced in 2002 the Renewable Obligations Order. This system obliges companies supplying electricity to purchase an annually increasing proportion of their electricity from so-called green or renewable (non-fossil) sources. This means they have to pay inflated prices, which they pass on to their customers through their electricity bills.

Blair announced in May 2002 plans to meet Britain's Kyoto and EU targets, and in March 2003 the government published an Energy White Paper on the UK's future energy strategy. In its Section 4.7 it says explicitly:

We have introduced a Renewables Obligation for England and Wales in April 2002. This will incentivise generators to supply progressively higher levels of renewable energy over time. The cost is met through higher prices to consumers. By 2010, it is estimated that this support and Climate Change Levy (CCL) exemption will be worth around £1 billion a year to the UK renewables industry. [Emphases added]

The same White Paper estimated that meeting the carbon reduction targets would increase household energy bills by up to 15%.

The reason for this is that the renewables are very expensive, and in particular the offshore wind farms on which both the previous and this government are so keen are the most costly of all fuel sources.

Politicians are complaining about rises in fuel bills that are largely the result of their own actions.

If you exaggeratedly tax companies in the pursuit of a "green energy" policy that follows the diktats of a discredited, if not outright refuted, theory like AGW (anthropogenic global warming), the inevitable result is higher prices for households and, in extreme cases, fuel poverty.

The coalition government is not much better than its socialist predecessor.

A few months ago SSE, one of the UK's six biggest energy companies, increased its prices by a further 8 per cent, and tried to explain that what made that price hike inevitable was the 13 per cent rise in the company's costs, two-thirds of which were due to “green” taxes and the soaring cost of connecting new wind farms to the grid.

While SSE called for a curb on these green levies – such as the crazy “carbon tax”, designed eventually to double the cost of electricity from fossil fuels, which still supply 70 per cent of our needs – the only official response was a fatuous call from our energy minister, Michael Fallon, for consumers to boycott SSE. Mr Fallon was oblivious to the fact that his Government’s policies will soon force all other energy companies to follow suit.

In the meantime, a new brand of criminals have emerged: the "energy thieves", utility clients who tamper with meters to steal their gas and electricity and in the process put the lives of neighbours at risk. Refusing to pay also means that their costs are passed on to honest customers.

The 25 June 2013 is a significant date not only in the history of the counterjihad movement but also in the history of freedom of speech in one of the countries that most contributed to its establishment: Britain.

That is the date on the letter to Robert Spencer announcing the UK Home Secretary Theresa May's decision that he should

be excluded from the United Kingdom on the grounds that your presence here is not conducive to the public good...

The Home Secretary notes that you are the founder of the blog Jihad Watch (a site widely criticized for being Islamophobic). You co-founded the Freedom Defense Initiative and Stop Islamization of America, both of which have been described as anti-Muslim hate groups.

So those were the reasons given for Spencer's and fellow founder of American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI) and SIOA Pamela Geller's ban.

Muhammad al-Arifi, who has advocated Jew-hatred, wife-beating, and jihad violence, entered the U.K. recently with no difficulty. In not allowing us into the country solely because of our true and accurate statements about Islam, the British government is behaving like a de facto Islamic state. The nation that gave the world the Magna Carta is dead.

Al-Arifi is just one of the many Islamists admitted to Britain, in this case just a few days before Spencer's ban. The interesting thing about him is that he's the author of these words:

Devotion to jihad for the sake of Allah, and the desire to shed blood, to smash skulls, and to sever limbs for the sake of Allah and in defense of His religion, is, undoubtedly, an honor for the believer. Allah said that if a man fights the infidels, the infidels will be unable to prepare to fight.

Robert Spencer, according to the Home Office, instead wrote this:

...it [Islam] is a religion and is a belief system that mandates warfare against unbelievers for the purpose for establishing a societal model that is absolutely incompatible with Western society because media and general government unwillingness to face the sources of Islamic terrorism these things remain largely unknown.

The grammatically and logically confused quotation is unlikely to be literal, as anyone who's read Robert's prose will easily realize. Nevertheless, what distinguishes the latter extract from the one immediately above? They both equate Islam with war against infidels, but one - Al-Arifi's - approvingly, and the other - Spencer's - disapprovingly:

[I]t is perfectly acceptable to speak about jihad violence in the UK, as long as you’re for it. If you oppose it, watch out...

This is even more true in view of the fact that the purpose of the two anti-jihad campaigners' visit to Britain was to lay a wreath at a memorial for British soldier Lee Rigby - murdered by two jihadists on a London street on 22 May - on Armed Forces Day, 29 June.

But that's not the end of it. A fund has been established to help the lawsuit against the entry ban.

They know that it’s not going to be easy:

The entire British government and media elite is determined to appease Islamic supremacists and discredit and silence the defenders of freedom. We will have to hire a top British legal team that can navigate through all the roadblocks and obstacles that the Home Office puts up.

It is only to be expected, then, that the Hitler regime tried to tear German society away from Christianity and return it to pagan beliefs. While Hitler made public proclamations that he would protect Christianity in order to be acceptable to the German people who were in their majority Christian, his recorded private statements and his actions tell a very different story.

Many absurd, unbelievable claims about Hitler's presumed Christianity have been made and, in this day and age when anything about Christianity, even the most preposterous assertion, as long as it's bad of course, is accepted as undisputable fact, Michael Coren has produced an excellent book, relatively short and easy to read, which I recommend to everybody who is interested in the truth. It is Heresy: Ten Lies They Spread About Christianity (Amazon USA)(Amazon UK) . In it he says:

In January 1942, the New York Times, certainly not now and not really even then a particular friend of Christianity, published a thirty-point program listing the central dogmas of the National Reich Church, a body established by the Nazis to replace Christianity and to eliminate Christian ideas from the next generation of young Germans. It's significant that the Times published this, because if such an internationally important newspaper was aware of Nazism's hatred of Christianity, we can be sure it was a known and accepted fact elsewhere.

This is the final statement of the program of dogmas:

On the day of the foundation of the National Reich Church the Christian cross shall be removed from all churches, cathedrals, and chapels inside the frontiers of the Reich and its colonies and will be replaced by the symbol of invincible Germany - the swastika.

And this is from another source that, like the NYT, can be accused of anything but conservative, pro-Christian bias, Wikipedia:

In power, the Hitler regime conducted a protracted Struggle with the Churches. Hitler moved to eliminate political Catholicism, while agreeing a Reich concordat with the Holy See which promised autonomy for the Catholic Church in Germany. Hitler then routinely violated the treaty, moved to close all Catholic organisations that weren't strictly religious, and permitted a persecution of the Catholic Church... He angered the churches by appointing the neo-pagan Alfred Rosenberg as official Nazi ideologist, and generally permitted or encouraged anti-church radicals such as Himmler, Goebbels and Bormann to conduct their persecutions of the churches.

Hitler was a Social Darwinist, and as such he believed that the universe is governed by the struggle between weak and strong, ideas that ran counter to Christianity, then prevailing in Germany.

"After the bridal couple's exchange of rings, the votive warden pronounces the blessing: Mother Earth, which lovingly bears us all, and Father Sky, who blesses us with his light and his weather, and all the beneficent powers of the air, may they rule over you until your destiny is fulfilled." [Once again, we see the evidence of the pagan: the Co-Rulership of the god and goddess are recognized, and once again, the creature is worshipped rather than the Creator.]

Crucifixes were gradually removed from hospitals and schools. Just as it's happening in our days.

Schools were massively targeted as part of a strategy to deChristianize the young. In 1935, Christian prayers in schools were stopped, and from 1941 onwards all lessons concerning Christianity were banned for all students over 14. Schoolchildren were taught what the Nazis called the "glorious pre-Christian German history".

The Nazi Teachers Association actively discouraged its members from taking religious education, and many teachers of religious studies (who were all required to be licensed by the state) inculcated neo-paganism into their pupils. Later on, teachers were explicitly and totally forbidden to attend voluntary religion classes organized by the Catholic Church.

The Nazis even used former Christian religious facilities, seized by the government, as schools where students were trained in male supremacist ideology, through the works of homosexual theorists like Otto Weininger.

Rites and ceremonies from Germany's pagan past were held all over the country. All Nazi meetings and rallies, under the shadow of flaming torches and where slogans full of hate and violence were shouted, were following pagan ceremonies undistinguishable from those held thousands of years before at pagan temples and altars.

The Nazis also used art to re-awaken paganism, using ancient Greek concepts and symbols and imitating Greek statues, showing strong men and women of the Aryan race. Hitler admired the Spartan model and dreamed of a superior race created by eugenics.

Laurence Rees, the contemporary British historian who wrote, directed and produced many BBC series and documentaries on the Second World War and in particular on Nazism, in his book (also on DVD) The Dark Charisma of Adolf Hitler (Amazon USA)(Amazon UK) described the thrust of Hitler's semi-autobiographical work Mein Kampf (Amazon USA)(Amazon UK) as "bleak nihilism" revealing a cold universe with no moral structure other than the fight between different people for supremacy:

What's missing from Mein Kampf, and this is a fact that has not received the acknowledgement it should—is any emphasis on Christianity.

And this despite the fact that Germany, Rees noted, had been Christian for a thousand years. So, he concluded:

The most coherent reading of Mein Kampf is that whilst Hitler was prepared to believe in an initial creator God, he did not accept the conventional Christian vision of heaven and hell, nor the survival of an individual "soul"... we are animals and just like animals we face the choice of destroying or being destroyed.

Hitler believed much more in, and was much more influenced by, Charles Darwin than Jesus Christ.

It's not entirely surprising that today, like in Hitler's day, we witness a return to paganism in conjunction to a return to strong nationalist sentiments. We should be wary of nationalism, which is not bad per se at all, in fact can be a positive force, but taken to extremes can become very irrational and dangerous, as indeed Hitler's example illustrates.

The danger of a return to values and ideas espoused by the Nazis is real, but doesn’t come so much from the direction of the usual suspects, “Islamophobic”, neo-Nazi groups, as from a much more mainstream, Leftist direction. The threat has two sources: one is the rise of Islam in the West – aided and abetted by the Left - with its well-known ideological and historical links to Nazism and anti-Semitism. The second source is less well-known. Recent historical, in-depth and ground-breaking research, thanks to the opening of national archives - previously closed to the public - after the Fall of the Berlin Wall, has thrown an entirely new light on what nurtured Nazi ideology. We already knew that Hitler and Nazism were neo-pagan and anti-Christian (despite what the Left says), but books like Karla Poewe's New Religions and the Nazis (Amazon USA)(Amazon UK), Gene Edward Veith's Modern Fascism: Liquidating the Judaeo-Christian Worldview (Amazon USA)(Amazon UK) and others go much further than that.

Regarding Poewe's work, which took 10 years of painstaking historical research, I can only agree with this review:

Inevitably claims that deny that Nazism was rooted in Christianity draw fire. As a scholar in modern and early modern Europe at the University of Victoria, I affirm this book as extremely well researched. The onus is on those who would disprove its assertions to do more thorough research--a daunting challenge indeed. The Nazis were as hostile to Christianity as to Judaism. The preparation for the ascendency of National Socialism provided by the advocates of new religions like Jacob Wilhelm Hauer is a sobering reality that needs to be understood more widely today.

It's an eerie feeling to recognise that Nazis, as I showed in the previous two article of this series, shared our days’ most cherished and growing ideas, from the normalisation of homosexuality to the decadence of the family, from the rise and destigmatisation of illegitimacy to the pantheism and anti-human feelings of environmentalism.

Thursday, 16 January 2014

There are many variations within neopaganism, deriving from the fact that it collects a large number of geographically diverse faiths with some common threads, but all neopagans agree on one crucial point: Christianity must be, if it is not already, defeated.

The book reveals a major, so far neglected, element of Nazi history: the contribution of the so-called new religions, defined as non-established religions, to the emergence of Nazi ideology in the twenties and thirties in Germany.

This book is not to be overlooked or underestimated because it's the result of a 10-year ground-breaking research in the German Federal Archives in Berlin and Koblenz. It was researched from original documents, letters and unpublished papers, including the SS personnel files held in the German Federal Archives.

The fall of the Berlin Wall gave Poewe, New Religions and the Nazis' author, access to the archives of the Berlin Mission Society. In 1995, while working in these archives, she discovered a great amount of material regarding conflicts between members of the Berlin Mission, a Christian missionary society, and the Nazis.

Karla Poewe is Professor Emeritus in Anthropology at the University of Calgary, in Canada, and Adjunct Research Professor at Liverpool Hope University, in England. She was interviewed by the Calgary Herald after her book came out:

"The new religions that developed in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s ushered in National Socialism and nurtured it," Poewe said.

"There were constant battles in the 1920s between Christians and the members of these new religions, because they identified Christianity as a kind of Jewish imperialism. They wanted nothing to do with it, so they came up with their own version. They tried to build a genuine German religion."

Because the Nazis were "on the far right," as a nationalist movement, they tend to be misinterpreted as a more extreme version of Christian conservatism. But "they weren't trying to conserve anything," Poewe said. They were rather extreme radicals, trying to overthrow completely the 1,000-year tradition of German Christianity -- replacing the cross with the swastika.

"There's a big mistake in identifying National Socialism as a Christian movement," Poewe said.

"There was a Deutsche Christen movement, but they weren't Christian at all. They rejected the Old Testament, Jesus had to be an Aryan, they were hostile to St. Paul, and they emphasized (the Gospel of) St. Mark. They remained in the church, but rejected everything Christian like the Trinity. Christ was at best a good philosopher." [Emphases added]

Poewe researched the former German missionary Jakob Wilhelm Hauer, who in the 1920s founded the German Faith Movement (Deutsche Glaubensbewegung or DGB), mixing Nordic and Hindu religions with Germanic idealistic philosophy. This new religion was intended to express the essence of National Socialism and the New German Man, as found in the the SS.

We have to consider the state of major turmoil into which the First World War threw Germany. The loss of the war and and the punitive, draconian conditions of the Treaty of Versailles imposed on Germany produced general discontent and resentment. Therefore Germans, and in particular intellectuals, took political, ideological and religious matters into their hands with the purpose of achieving national regeneration.

By fusing politics, religion, theology, Indo-Aryan metaphysics and Darwinian theory they intended to create a new, genuinely German, pagan-faith-based political movement: that was National Socialism.

Hauer, founder of the DGB,

is particularly interesting, Poewe said, because he sought the pagan roots of German religion in Hinduism. In pre-history, the Aryans who invaded northern India were the same race as those who later became Germans. And Hauer found the warrior universe of the Bhagavad Gita particularly inspiring -- "it fed him the kind of moral relativism he sought," Poewe said.

"The rejection of Christianity was due to the fact that it is universal, and they wanted something local" -- the Volkisch (folk) phenomenon. "They rejected the universalist. They wanted something with a historical-genetic-racial link to them," Poewe said. "They also rejected Christian morality. They couldn't stand the Ten Commandments. They were totally against any categorical or timeless morality. They wanted something opportunistic, something that changed with the human circumstances." [Emphasis added]

Sounds familiar. Where have I heard this before? There are no moral absolutes, anything goes, we just want to be happy, we indeed have a right to be happy: that's all there is to ethics. It sounds very, very modern. It's today's prevailing ethos, complete with the jettisoning of Christianity.

Add to that our own revival of eugenics, wide use of science in reproduction and epidemic of abortions, and Nazism looks more and more like a pioneering movement.

And Christian universalism, mentioned in the quotation, is indeed a profound antidote to racism, now as in Hitler's time.

Unsurprisingly, Poewe observed that former Nazis were prominent in the German New Age movement of the 1970s.

The Nazi movement "took elements from the Christian religion, but it didn't mean they were Christian. They also took things from Hinduism, from Buddhism -- Tibetan Buddhism was particularly popular among the SS. From this they concocted a mythology that gave them a picture of the world that appealed to them. They wrote about it, novels, plays, poetry. It was very political, in some ways pantheistic."

And here's another element of great modernity in Nazism:

Hauer's DGB bunde shared with National Socialism a tendency toward homoerotism. Hauer himself was permissibly heterosexual, but "homosexuality was very tolerated in these youth movements, and a high percentage of the SA and SS were homosexual or bisexual. People like to think that because Adolf Hitler murdered (SA leader) Ernst Rohm, who was homosexual, he was repressive of homosexuality. But that wasn't the case. It's a myth to think the Nazi movement was against homosexuality. Far from it; it wasn't sexually repressive at all," Poewe said. [Emphasis added]

Wednesday, 15 January 2014

In Redbridge, a London suburb, police have been visiting designated 'Public Sex Environments' (or 'PSEs', including public parks) advising male homosexuals of the risks of indulging in public sex, lest some "homophobic" crime is committed.

Another politically correct nicety in the headline of the newspaper article linked to above, beside "homophobic crime", is "outdoor sex spots", similar to picnic spots or panoramic places.

The same article says that public sex is illegal, but there's no suggestion of police arresting the exhibitionists or telling them to do their dirty business at home - which would also be safer for them, without the taxpayers' having to pay the police for this extra, unnecessary work.

And apparently this is happening all over the country, from Scotland to leafy Surrey, the worst affected county. There are now hundreds of public spaces unofficially legitimised by the police as 'Public Sex Environments'.

When I saw the title, I thought the tea and biscuits were metaphorical but, lo and behold, they are as literal and concrete as you and me:

This from the Surrey Comet:

"Illicit thrill-seekers on the look-out for sex at cruising and dogging spots in Surrey have been provided with £120 worth of tea and biscuits by Surrey Police. Surrey Police admitted providing hot beverages and snacks between May and July at the Hog's Back Cafe, a well known cruising spot between Guildford and Farnham.

"It is believed neighbourhood officers and the lesbian and gay liaison officer (LAGLO) have also gone down to the woods to have a chat with people using a 'dogging' site at Wisley Gardens just off the A3 near Cobham."

Why the police do nothing is explained by the kind of politically protected people who are most likely to indulge in these activities:

Meanwhile in Scotland:

"A horrified East Kilbride mum is warning parents to be aware after her children witnessed an unsavoury incident at a local beauty spot.

"The Westwood woman, who did not wish to be named, told the News her 15-year-old son spotted two male pensioners involved in a sex act in the bird hide at Cathkin Marsh.

"Shockingly, the recent incident at the 'dogging' hotspot reportedly took place in the middle of the afternoon."

This is from the article about Redbridge linked to above:

Pc Anton Brown, an LGBT liaison officer for Redbridge, said: “Thefts, robberies, rape and other violent assaults take place at these locations and victims are scared to report them as they do not want to be ‘outed’. They are often men who have sex with men but don’t necessarily identify as being gay.”

That a double standard is applied - there is a law for homosexuals and a law for everybody else - is obvious from this:

Every morning before opening his cafe on Ockham Common in Surrey, Stephen Bungay collects a bin-bag full of debris from outside his kiosk including sex toys and latex gloves. He says that the rangers from Surrey Wildlife pursue dog-walkers who fail to pick up dog-mess, but he has never seen them ask a cruiser to pick up their condoms.

In an email George says: "When did public spaces where people might stroll with their dogs or kids become officially designated 'Public Sex Environments'? And how do we get these politically correct plods to do their sodding job?"

The first is a rhetorical question. In fact there is no legal designation of 'Public Sex Environments'. They are just well known, established areas where individuals meet for sex. There are even police detailed guidelines on how to manage and police PSEs.

This is the umpteenth example of how the law is twisted to accommodate homosexuals, Muslims and all other groups that are by definition "victims".

The deliberate lie in the matter of religion was introduced into the world by Christianity... Let it not be said that Christianity brought man the life of the soul, for that evolution was in the natural order of things...

The best thing is to let Christianity die a natural death... When understanding of the universe has become widespread... Christian doctrine will be convicted of absurdity... Christianity has reached the peak of absurdity... And that's why someday its structure will collapse... The only way to get rid of Christianity is to allow it to die little by little...

Christianity is an invention of sick brains: one could imagine nothing more senseless, nor any more indecent way of turning the idea of the Godhead into a mockery...

I realize that man, in his imperfection, can commit innumerable errors - but to devote myself deliberately to errors, that is something I cannot do. I shall never come personally to terms with the Christian lie. Our epoch in the next 200 years will certainly see the end of the disease of Christianity.

Who said this? It sounds very much like Richard Dawkins, with its reference to evolution and science ("When understanding of the universe has become widespread") as antithetical forces to Christianity, not to mention its prediction of the latter's death.

One of the myriad unfounded accusations levelled at Christianity these days is the claim that Hitler was a Christian. The reality is that he was not a Christian at all, but very close to paganism.

Paganism is a generic umbrella term that encompasses various and different beliefs of pre-Christian European peoples, from classical Roman and Greek to Norse and Germanic.

Although Europe's paganism was replaced by Christianity, it did not die. In the 16th and 17th centuries some European thinkers began to rediscover paganism.

To its rebirth contributed in particular the philosophers of the Enlightenment, the movement of thought whose political result was the French Revolution. The French revolutionaries inspired by the Jakobin ideology made use of signs of pagan mythology.

The Jacobins, leaders of "The Terror", the bloodiest period of the French Revolution, were influenced by neopaganism and hated Christianity. Before Nazism, they first embodied the connections between neopagan ideas and violence.

Fascism is the modern world's nostalgia for paganism. It is a sophisticated culture's revolt against God.

From an early age Adolf Hitler had a lifelong passion for pagan legends, which explains his obsession with Richard Wagner's music, with its "only grandiose themes" of "gods and heroes". Wagner's operas are said to have had a profound, almost religious effect on the Fuhrer.

Not only Hitler, but also many of his associates were fascinated by the history and mythology of the German Volk, which helped shape the political activities of these men.

The legends of German mythology, substantially the same as the Norse ones, are completely pagan and pessimistic in nature. The Earth and Heaven were destined to be utterly destroyed by the Frost Giants, in a final great battle between Good and Evil, in which Evil was predestined to win and the whole of creation to be destroyed. The only ray of light in all this darkness was the idea that dying a heroic death would make everything else pale into insignificance. This notion of heroism and fighting to the death against all odds was very congruous with the fanatic loyalty wanted by Hitler and Himmler.

Wagner held anti-Semitic views, and took great pride in being a member of the "German race" and in his German ancestry. He wrote that he considered himself "the most German of the Germans".

Head of the SS Heinrich Himmler, who studied books on Germanic lore, mysticism, and secret societies, came to regard Hitler as a god, another sign of non-Christian, pagan religiosity.

The secret initiation ceremonies of the SS were dominated by references to the ancient Germanic sagas. The Nazi Party was called by Hermann Esser "an association of visionaries, worshippers of Wotan", a Germanic god.

Presenting a similarity to today's environmentalism with its pantheistic streak were Himmler's proclamations of the sacred status of the German lands and peoples as a faith. He used ancient German and Nordic mythology as a source of the SS symbols, oaths and rituals. The rooms of their secret meetings were decorated with runes, prehistoric signs supposed to give the power of prophecy to anyone who could read them. The very symbol of the Schutzstaffel, twin twisted lightning bolts to indicate SS, is a runic symbol.

Initially Himmler wanted German women to adopt the same moral code of the heroines of ancient German legends, although he later changed his view to encourage them to have as many children as possible, whether they were married or not. He and Hitler had considered abolishing the "criminal institution of the Christian Church known as marriage", but realised that Germans were not yet ready for such a radical idea. How happy these supreme Nazi leaders would be if they could see what is happening now in our society.

As a ceremony for illegitimate children Himmler created a "secular christening", called an "SS name-giving", in which the child was wrapped in a blanket covered with embroidered swastikas and runes and set before an altar, with the parents laying their hands on him and solemnly speaking his name. For their birthdays these children received by the SS a gift of candles, manufactured at no charge by the prisoners at Dachau.

Himmler's mystical zeal exasperated even Hitler sometimes, although only temporarily and he never tried to rein it in. Hitler wrote:

What nonsense! Here we have at last reached an age that has left all mysticism behind it, and now he wants to start that all over again. We might as well have stayed with the church. At least it had tradition. To think that I may some day be turned into an SS saint! Can you imagine it? I would turn over in my grave ...

And about Himmler's archeological excavations:

Why do we call the whole world's attention to the fact that we have no past? It isn't enough that the Romans were erecting great buildings when our forefathers were still living in mud huts; now Himmler is starting to dig up these villages of mud huts ... All we prove by that is that we were still throwing stone hatchets and crouching around open fires when Greece and Rome had already reached the highest stage of culture. We really should do our best to keep quiet about this past. Instead Himmler is making a great fuss about it all. The present-day Romans must be having a laugh at these revelations.

Monday, 13 January 2014

Certainty is a feeling, an emotion. Reason, on the other hand, gives rise to doubts and uncertainties.

Science is rational, and exactly for that reason it is uncertain, which is what many people fail to appreciate. A widespread myth is that reason brings about - and knowledge means - certainty.

This is what causes all the confusions of the kind that surrounded vaccines and autism in Britain a few years ago, for example, and the general confusions about probability and risk: what causes them is the fact that people expect certainties from science. Instead, in reality science is made up of theories and hypotheses, which may be refuted now, or temporarily confirmed until they are refuted and replaced by a better theory later. That's how science progresses.

Reason can be used to arrive at certainties, but not at pieces of knowledge. This is the case when reason is used in logic, but only because in logical deductions we never arrive at new knowledge.

It is certain that, in a logical deduction, if the premise is true the conclusion is always true, but only because the conclusion does not say anything which was not already contained in the premise. A very simple example is: "If A and B are both true, then A is true".

The logical conclusion makes what was already contained in the premise explicit, that's why, if the latter is true (or better, well founded), so is the former. But this process does not originate new knowledge. It is a process of transformation of one statement into another, not of discovery.

This is why non-philosopher atheists like Richard Dawkins generate confusion among their followers: because they themselves are confused in the first place.

To identify science with rationality, although correct - even if we must add that science is only one among the various rational activities of the human intellect, not the only one as Dawkins et al seem to believe, and a religion like Christianity, for example, is another -, condemns science to perpetual uncertainty.

Furthermore, science does not establish the limits of rationality, but only those of possibility. In other words, what science does is to say: "This is not possible because it goes against the laws of nature". But it doesn't tell you, within the multiple, mutually-contradicting possibilities, which is the true one.

It must remain understood, however, that the best scientific theory we have could be wrong and one day refuted.

But even presuming that it won't be, science - both as a whole and as single scientific theories - rules out, as I was saying, physical (or empirical) impossibilities, namely the phenomena that go counter to the laws of nature (i.e. the laws of science), but among the various remaining possibilities cannot tell you which is the true one.

That's why saying that science has eliminated God (a creator of everything) is absurd. For as long as a creator of everything remains compatible with the laws of nature, as it has always been and it is even more now that the Big Bang theory presumes a period preceding the birth of the universe in which laws of nature did not exist, the hypothesis of God as creator is a possibility. Science can ony tell you that it is possible, and not if it's true or not.

Atheists, and not only the people that Dawkins managed to mesmerise but the British zoologist himself, don't seem to properly grasp what they are saying. And I'm not referring to God or religion, but to science: they misunderstand science itself.

I am willing to admit that Dawkins is aware of many of the things I said, that's why he always uses qualifiers like "almost certainly" or "probably" when he says that God doesn't exist or that science leads to that denial. However, he doesn't act or write as if he had any doubts at all. And, as I said at the beginning, certainty is an emotional state, not the product of rational thought.

Who knows, maybe science, born out of Christianity, with the first scientists wishing to understand God's work - the creation - through it, after a period in which it's been dominated by naturalism (only nature exists) aka materialism (only matter exists), will turn out to be just the way in which in the end humanity arrives at God, which was science founders' original intention.

Saturday, 11 January 2014

First, Christianity was the main spiritual force of the West, so much so that the latter was known as Christendom.

Then, atheism prevailed, followed by paganism, and now it looks like Satanism is being recognised as a legitimate... what? Religion? Faith? Spiritual orientation, which anyone is entitled to practice as much as a sexual one?

And why not? After all, why should we discriminate? Discrimination is the last, or one of the last, remaining sins. And this applies to every sense of the word, good as well as bad, as in "taste discrimination" to indicate refinement, or in "discrimination between right and wrong". The only exception is reverse discrimination, which is always a virtue because it is meant to fight discrimination - if it sounds absurd it's because it is.

The New York-based Satanic Temple formally submitted its application to a panel that oversees the Capitol grounds

The application includes an artist's rendering of Satan as Baphomet, a goat-headed figure with horns, wings and a long beard

They want it to sit where a Ten Commandments monument sat in 2012

In the rendering, Satan is sitting in a pentagram-adorned throne with smiling children next to him.

This satanic group claimed that, if the Ten Commandments could have a monument, so should their idol figure. Thinking otherwise would be discrimination. Now, tell me: how can anybody these days object to such an argument?

It's the same line of reasoning that led to the passing of homomarriage laws in various countries: if people of different sex can get married, why discriminate against same-sex couples?

And, if the West is now post-Christian, why should we give Christianity a special place, especially after the influx of so many cultural enrichers who adhere to different religions, sometimes having a moral code directly opposite to our own - Islam springs to mind -, which is derived from Christianity but people have forgotten where it comes from and think it arose from nothing, the same as the universe, life and cosnciousness? We are used, by now, to the idea that something comes from nothing: that this is so counter-evidential, that nobody has ever experienced, witnessed this type of occurrence doesn't trouble our "scientific-minded" atheists half as much as the idea of a creator of all that exists.

'The statue will also have a functional purpose as a chair where people of all ages may sit on the lap of Satan for inspiration and contemplation.'

The Satanic Temple maintains that the Oklahoma Legislature's decision to authorize a privately funded Ten Commandments monument at the Capitol opened the door for its statue.

The Ten Commandments monument was placed on the north steps of the building in 2012, and the Oklahoma chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union has sued to have it removed.

Perhaps we should have Nelson removed from his column in Trafalgar Square, and demand in his place a statue of Hitler, Stalin or Britain's own serial killer John Christie.

Why the Satanist statue should be allowed, or even considered as it seems to be, but not Hitler's, I doubt that anyone can provide good reasons for, that can be accepted outside of psychiatric hospitals of course.

On its website, the Satanic Temple explains that it 'seeks to separate Religion from Superstition by acknowledging religious belief as a metaphorical framework with which we construct a narrative context for our goals and works.

'Satan stands as the ultimate icon for the selfless revolt against tyranny, free & rational inquiry, and the responsible pursuit of happiness,' the website says.

The return of the persecution of Christians under Islam is the most visible aspect of a larger and more dangerous phenomenon: the return of Islam as a global force. The West ignores those being crucified again at its own peril — bringing to memory the words of German pastor Martin Niemoller, who came to understand — but only after being sent to a concentration camp during World War II — what it meant to face a totalitarian ideology hostile to all who reject it:

First they [the Nazis] came for the communists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the socialists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Catholic. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.

It may seem relatively peaceful now in Western countries, and we all have a natural tendency to avoid facing problems if we possibly can.

Even when something closer to home occurs, like the killing of Drummer Lee Rigby by a Muslim jihadist in a London street, or the use of British white girls by Muslim paedophile and sex slave rings, we continue to believe that these incidents are not part of a major trend, and we keep sleeping serenely.

But history has repeatedly shown that we should take the first hints because, if we wait for the macroscopic signs, they may be easily recognisable for a reason: the problem has become so big that we can no longer address it without violence and tragedy.

A quarter of the inhabitants of a village, about 500 Christians, were killed by Muslims. Some Muslim villagers who knew of the premeditated attack left without warning the Christians.

A man in the video says that Christians have not retaliated. He wants the world to know that "Christians never fight with Muslims. All that happens is always Muslims attacking Christians, in some cases Christians defending themselves."

We should be aware that whenever we hear or read, on our media, of "sectarian" violence, if it concerns Muslims and Christians it is not true. Violence is only from one side, and is brutal, as in this case, with children slaughtered and people's heads cut in two.

Thursday, 2 January 2014

There seems to be a lot of confusion about what atheism is or entails. The fact that many - albeit not all - atheists declare that they have no faith or believe in nothing, in itself shows that they have not really taken the time and effort to understand the implications of the position they hold.

The question of God is the question of the origin of things. It is a typical philosophical, and more specifically metaphysical, question.

When Richard Dawkins or people like him compare the idea of God to that of fairies, they are hopefully disingenuous - the alternative being downright stupid.

The concept of God is a necessity in one of the two fundamental explanations of the origin of everything. The other explanation is chance. Fairies do not appear in either.

The question of God is also related to the question of what is the ultimate reality: mind or matter.

Philosophers have debated this issue since the beginning of their profession, answering that it is the former in the case of idealists, or the latter if they are materialists.

The vast majority of classical philosophers throughout the ages, including our time, have rejected materialism and think that mind is the ultimate reality. That doesn't mean that all idealists believe in God - although a great proportion does -, but that a simple materialism as the one espoused by Dawkins (I am referring to him because he is, by his own behaviour, the most vocal and visible of contemporary atheists) is generally found deeply unsatisfactory by those whose profession is to critically analyse common ideas and question what is often accepted unthinkingly.

Dawkins is not a philosopher himself. By training and trade he is a zoologist. But when he talks about religion he steps ouside his scientist's boots and puts on a philosopher's hat. Nothing wrong with that, provided he knows what he's talking about.

The first thing to notice here is how much many people, probably taking their cue from public figures like non-philosophers Peter Atkins, Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, have trivialised the issue of belief in God as if it were simply the battle of the old versus the new, the forces of obscurantism v enlightenment, ancient v modern, irrationality v reason, superstition v logic, backwardness v progress, and obviously religion versus science.

The reality is that the battle of ideas surrounding the existence of God has always been present in the history of philosophy, and thinkers have predominantly tended to side with the belief in God.

That Christianity has a solid rational foundation in centuries of philosophical thought is something that - I suspect from the comments they leave in public forums - would surprise many atheists.

That among the greatest philosophers of all time are saints and founders of the Church like St Augustine, St Anselm and St Thomas Aquinas might shock them even more.

But let's get back to the question at the beginning of this article. Numerous - I presume the most naive - atheists appear to be convinced that not believing in God does not entail anything, and that it is just the default non-choice - in the same way as their guide and model Dawkins would consider not believing in fairies the default position.

The reality is different.

There are only three possible answers to the question "Does God exist?".

One, the easiest and probably preferred by lazy minds, is to sit on the fence and declare neutrality explicitly or, simply by not engaging with it, implicitly.

The second is to say that the universe (or universes) have an intelligent designer, God.

The third answer, atheism, in denying the second one is by mere logic taking the opposite view. If there is no design, we are left only with chance. If there is no mind, we are left only with matter.

I'll explore these ideas in more detail in other articles. For now, I'm anticipating that the theoretical, non-observational assumptions are necessary and very strong on both sides of the controversy.

There is no default opinion, no path of less resistance. Both stances require faith, and a belief that has many holes in the evidence for it.

The commonly-held opinion that atheism is not a faith - like a religion of its own kind - is totally unfounded.

Rational arguments live on both sides of the fence, not only one. And so do emotional stances or intuitive statements.

And, if anything, the most logically cogent reasons and scientifically powerful evidence seem to be increasingly supporting the belief of a mind creating all that exists. The progress of science, with theoretical constructs in physics that are necessary for explanation but escape observation, on one side, and the practical impossibility of matter, life and consciousness all originating by chance, on the other, far from supporting the atheist belief seems more and more to confirm the theist one.

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About Me

Philosophy graduate, journalist, website creator and
blogger born in Italy and living in London. I have been London correspondent for Italian media, including Panorama, L'Espresso, La
Repubblica. I translated Peter Singer's book Animal Liberation into Italian.